Speeding up the telegraphs: a forecast of the new telegraphy

Abstract

This paper, which is mainly a forecast of the probable form that the telegraph service will take in the course of the next 25 years—a form that is described as the “ new telegraphy”—refers to the world-wide complaints about the unsatisfactory condition of the telegraph service and the need for improving it and speeding it up until it takes its proper place alongside the telephone.It is agreed that these complaints are well founded, and the telegraph service is described as being dear, slow and inaccessible. Speeding up the telegraphs and bringing them into closer touch with the industrial and financial life of the world is put forward as a necessity of the future. We must type as well as talk. We must “teletype” as well as “teletalk”It is pointed out that the telegraph has many important advantages over the telephone, especially for communicating over distances of more than 50 miles, and the present ailment of the telegraph is diagnosed as excessive circuit facilities and defective terminal facilities. That is to say, there are more circuits than are required for the traffic at present available, and not sufficient telegraph machinery, and the telegraph equipment is not arranged, like the telephone, so as to be linked up.closely with the business life of the community. The telegraph is not, but should be, at every business-man's elbow, like the telephone.The remedy is the creation of printing telegraph or, more briefly, teletype exchanges, giving telegraph facilities similar to the telephone facilities we now enjoy. This will evidently be the result of certain developments now taking place in A ~ierica, where both the Western Union and the Bell Telephone Companies are about to offer telegraph typewriter service to business men, that is to say to subscribers. If this proves commercially profitable, it will inevitably lead to the establishment of teletype exchanges in all the American cities, and they will be linked up by trunk or long-distance telegraph lines. This will put business men all over the United States directly in touch with each other by printing telegraphy. In this way the new telegraphy will be born.The paper foretells that, in the course of years, this new development will have a revolutionary effect on telegraph offices, which will become automatic switching exchanges, very like an automatic telephone exchange; and the telegraph operators, like the telephone girls, are doomed to disappear, and their places will be taken by a few telegraph engineers and mechanics wandering about in the deserted telegraph operating-rooms, looking after the telegraph switching apparatus.Examples are given of the advantages that this new telegraphy will confer on the business community.The machine that has made this new telegraphy possible is the start-stop telegraph printer—provided with a typewriter keyboard and requiring only momentary synchronism. It can therefore be readily switched from one circuit to another. It can work at from 40 to 80 words a minute over any distance from 100 feet to 5 000 miles, and any girl typist can use it. This is the business-man's printing telegraph— the Ford car of telegraphy.